This is a good
introduction to the importance of Althusser to film theory by
Rosen 1986: 156ff.

[...]

What especially links film
theory to the post-structuralism of the 1970s is the great impact of
that sector of post-structuralism which claimed to be producing
new elaborations of theorics of human subjectivity. Therefore
[...] it will be useful to introduce some of the relevant aspects
of what has been called the theory of the subject.

The term subject denotes a
fundamental human mental activity of interacting with things in
the world by opposing them to one's own consciousness, as in the
philosophical (epistemological) distinction between subject and object.
However, by the 1970s French post-structuralists, including such
divergent thinkers as Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques
Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan, had
from varying but intertwining perspectives all proposed that the
traditional philosophical conception of the subject is misleading
in important respects. Against the strong Cartesian tradition in
French intellectual history, they argued in different ways that
the self-awareness of human subjectivity is founded on a central misrecognition by the subjector self, or egothat it
is somehow central to the processes of knowing the world. In
general, these post-structuralists at that time argued that the
subject's knowledge of world and self is shaped by discourse. Ultimately this could be to say that
human subjectivity finds itself through a discursive universe
which produces and reproduces that subjectivity and, often
enough, its constitutive illusions. /157/

[...]

To be aware of oneself as a
distinct mental entity, a consciousness, is to have identity.
Phenomenologically, of course, this is a constant, everyday
experience which enables one to confront existence and undertake
activities as a "continuous" human being; that is, I
remain conscious that I am the "same" person today I
was yesterday, which is a guarantee of my identity. Such
self-awareness, however, can also be described with referencc to
processes not reducible to the unique experience by an individual
of his or her own consciousness. It is possible to argue that
such consciousness is a product, or construct, rather than an
irreducible a priori. Such an argument would rest on an
account of how this mode of subjectivity is produced and how it
functions.

If one attempts this kind of
argument from the perspective of social theory, the claim would
be that to take the position of a self-aware subject is to
participate in a process valuable to social institutions and/or
to a society. In that case one's identity is produced as a result
of ongoing social processes. Such a perspective was advanced
influentially during thc I960s and early I970s in Louis
Althusser's reformulations of Marxist theories of ideology.[1]

For Althusser ideology is a
requisite component of any society. It consists in a vast network
of representational systems that provide the means with which
individuals may think of their existence. But since it operates
by delimiting as well as providing possible significations of
existencc, that massive representational network Althusser calls
ideology is restrictive of thought and experience. He argues that
such restrictions are crucial components of social organization
and order: To maintain themselves over time, societies require
that their multitude of agents have a minimal commonality of
"consciousness," which means that those possibilities
and limitations on thought and experience must to a significant
degree be produced as an integral part of any lasting
societal organization. This perspective leads Althusser to
suggest that the category of the subject is a necessary (if not
sufficient) support for the workings of ideology.

Such a conception, if accepted,
has clear theoretical and methodological consequences for any semiotics, since it envisions representational
systems as intricately knotted with broad processes of social
organization. But here we will concentrate on the category of the
subject in such a framework. For Althusser, ideology exists in an
uncountable number of signifying entities. From the viewpoint of
"consciousness," it can be said that we are
"surrounded" from birth by signifying discourses which
necessarily provide the paths by which we understand and
experience. But from another perspective it is these discourses
/158/which construct individual social agents as human subjects.
Insofar as any instance of signification presumes an addressee or
"listener," it aims at something which is presumed to
be able to understanda someone. An individual is addressed
in such discursive processes as a coherent consciousness, a
subject.

The mechanisms by which
discourses assume and thus appeal to a purportedly pre-existing
subjectand thereby are in fact prior connditions for its
productionAlthusser sums up with the term interpellation. This term can name the act whereby a member of
parliament questions a minister who is obligated to respond and
assume responsibility for the actions of his or her government.
Althusser metaphorically theorizes that all human individuals as
social agents are constantly being interpellated. The discourses
which interpellate them are not simply autonomous, but are
amalgamated with social institutions, ranging from religion (one
is called to account by an overarching authority) to legal
practices (one is called to take responsibility as a legal
subject for one's thoughts and actions) to everyday activities
throughout a social formation.

If it still seems puzzling that
Althusser would place such emphasis on ideology as
representational processes and then focus on what can be called a
"subject effect" as a social function, then we might
elaborate a bit on the centrality of this effect to discursive
practices. Every time an individual "uses" a signifying
system, such as verbal language, the very form of that system
includes "places" that attest to the existence of
subjects of signification. In the fundamental, therefore
privileged system of verbal language, examples include personal
pronouns and verb tensewhich always is relative to the
present time of the speaker and thus assumes a subject of
language in time. This subject is ultimately posited in discourse
as the sender and/or comprehender of significations. In this
context, it can be said that Althusser focuses attention on a
conflation of levels: the sender and/or comprehender of
significations, able to speak and understand, is conflated with a
social subject mandated by social institutions, able to
"choose," "responsible" for his or her acts,
ultimately culpable for antisocial behavior. Since it is
ideology, a kind of discursive environment, that provides the
mediations for understanding actual existence, an individual's
placement as a social subject is a placement as subject
"in" discourse.[2]

On this view, then, the human
subject is a function of a social formation which assumes and
thereby continually constructs it in practices, in institutions,
and therefore through discourse, without which there cannot be
social practices and institutions, as a universal category of
"lived experience." By constructing subjects in
ideologywhich is, ultimately, a framework for understanding
existence beneficial to a given social orderthe social
formation works to maintain its own relative stability through
time (both in the lifetime of an individual's experience and
across the time of successive generations). The experience of
subjectivity is intricately interlocked with the reproduction by
a social formation of itself as a "natural" state of
things. In classical accounts, of course, the production of what
exists as "natural" is the operation of ideology. /159/

Such a perspective has direct
implications for film theory. If ideology consists in a universe
of discursive representationality, then insofar as cinema works
as representation and/or as a component of discursive systems of
representation, filmic signifying systems can and should be
investigated as ideology. If discursive effects are inseparable
from interpellating individuals as subjects, then even film
theory conceptualizing cinema as ideology should inquire about
the mechanisms through which an individual film spectator
"recognizes" himself or herself as subject in the film
viewing process. In fact, this became a question consistently
raised in film analysis during the I970s, though not always from
the explicit premise of social interpellation. Given the
importance of the politicized wing of semiotic investigators of
cinema, one would expect the fundamental repetitions identified
in investigations stemming from the structuralist tendency to be related to questions of
cinema as ideology: what concepts, myths, ideas, etc. are being
thus recirculated? But such researches were further tied to a
strong interest in what came to be called the study of "the
position of the subject" or "subject-positioning"
in cinema: how do dominant cinematic strategies strive to
position the spectators as subjects, and what are the
possibilities for contesting this positioning? This line of
inquiry proved to be one of the strongest and most fertile in
recent film theory.

However, if one examines a film
for the mechanisms by which it offers a position or positions for
the spectator to recognize himself or herself as subject, one
will encounter a certain lack in the theory of ideology. A theory
of ideology is not a specific account of human subjectivity as
such, but an account of the production, circulation, and
constraints of what is taken as knowledge and/or positions proper
to knowledge in a given social formation. Thus, if one agrees
with Althusser that the category of thc subject is of special
importance for ideological formations, there is a theoretical
need for exploring the attraction of "subjecthood."
What profit is there for an individual human being in assuming
the positionality defined by that category? The very notions of
interpellation and spectator-positioning seem to assume
individuals who already desire to recognize themselves as
subjects. Hence, an understanding of that desire is necessary
even to pose those issues in the analysis of films.

Given the linkage of ideology
and this desire with discursivity, the attraction, the appeal, of
signifying processes requires a more specific theorization. This
amounts to asking for an elaborate and rigorous account of
relationships among text, meaning, pleasure, and spectatorial
position. What are the processes by which specific discursive
patterns appeal to an individual as subject? Social theory alone
could not answer this question. But the ways one responds to this
question will determine how one analyzes film texts and theorizes
cinema.

In cinema semiotics of the
1970S, this issue was most often met by treating signification in
terms provided by particular kinds of psychoanalytic theory. Now, if one attributes any validity to the
psychoanalytic enterprise, this move will not seem too
surprising. It is possible to view even classical psychoanalysis /160/
precisely as an account of the individual's desire for
identity, for secure subjective positionality, against forces
which constantly threaten it. Freud's "discovery" of
the unconscious is inseparable from his account of human
identity as being founded on a repression which is a necessary condition for
forming a sense of self.

For Freudians, primary
experiences of identity are constructed against a radical
anxiety, summarized as castration anxiety. Processes of desire, sexuality, and
fantasy are intertwined with consciousness of self, which is
produced to counter that founding anxiety and is always in
dialectic with it. As a result, the normal experience of identity
occurs only on condition that its basic processes are hidden from
the "I" thus constructed. This is an essential Freudian
point: there is always a fundamental misrecognition involved in
the individual's desire to findor recognizehis or her
self as stable and secure.

The thesis that the unconscious
is the basis for the existence of self-consciousness
("ego") can therefore serve as an explanation of the
generalized desire of individual humans to seek secure subjective
positions. Classical psychoanalytical conceptions could therefore
be of great importance to the theorization of how films appeal to
human subjects. In addition, however, the psychoanalytic theory
utilized in recent cinema semiotics has often been inflected by
the work of Jacques Lacan. Much of the conceptual apparatus for the most
influential work on subject positioning in cinema has been
provided by his formulations.

[2] This link between signifying form and
social institutions via the concept of the subject is not made as
explicitly by Althusser himself. However, insofar as the category
of the subject has been of interest in film theory from a
sociocultural perspective, a jump such as this seems necessary.

On the provisions made in
structures of verbal language for subject effects, one constant
reference has been the work of Emile Benveniste. Sec his articles
such as "Relationships of Person in the Verb,"
"The Correlations of Tense in the French Verb,"
"The Nature of Pronouns," and ''Subjectivity in
Language" all included in his collection Problems in
General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral
Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971). For example, see
p.224: "It is in and through language that man [sic]
constitutes himself as a subject. . ."